Carnevali, Carnevali,

poet of the resistance

you never could resist

your shameless love for the grave

and your beloved hunger for truth.

Oh Gentle Brother to Beauty,

Oh Shameless Sister to Passion

you never did care to resist

that slow blue fate

so common to every angel.

You who loved Rimbaud

could not be saved by him.

You who worshipped Whitman

swallowed his voice deep into your heart and wove his beard upon your soul

but could not, dear Carnevali, be saved by him.

Death cursed your name

and how happily you pissed in his face.

Seizures terrorized your body

but your mind would not relinquish 

the wealth of your clairvoyant love.

A young general too impatient

to avoid the front lines

you ordered us to keep language

intense and alive, to prevent

oppression from carving truth

into a coffin, and poetry into a corpse.

Carnevali, Carnevali,

poet of the resistance

magic-eyed muse to the geniuses of your time.

You: who dared to scold Hemmingway and Joyce and Williams.

The shimmer of your spirit still warms horizons

decades beyond the fury of your passage,
resisting the casual chill of obscurity,

declining the sentimental courtesies of tragedy.

(from I Made My Boy Out of Poetry)

Aberjhani